


Coda

by eldritcher



Series: The Heralds of Dusk [11]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-04-01 06:49:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4009996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was quite the talker, my brother. He could talk to deadwood and make it sigh, I have always believed. His cadence was all wrong for one of the Noldor, as Father noted critically more than once. My brother would trill the deeper syllables and caress the softer ones and enunciate each word as if it were the most melodious sound in the entire world. I listened to him speak and began to learn music unconsciously as the melody of his words washed my awareness into pleasant stupor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coda

Contrary to misconceptions foisted upon the young students of lore by pompous historians, I have never learnt music. They speak of how I learnt the harp from Vana and the lyre from Nessa and of numerous other anecdotes. I can truthfully say that my love for music would not have lasted if I had been confined to training. 

Father tried to instil in me a love for the works of the forge. While there was something undoubtedly fascinating about creating beauty from plain metal, I have never been fond of voluntary manual exertion. 

Mother tried to interest me in architecture. I loathed measurements. She abandoned the idea of teaching me forthwith when it came to light that I preferred to make speculations on measurements instead of employing scales and measures. 

After my parents admitted defeat in the matter of training me, I was despatched to Nolofinwë and Grandfather. While I cared neither for the woodlands nor for the city, the city was a remarkably vast improvement in that it held my elder brother. He rarely joined Father and Mother while they went prospecting for lode. But whenever he came, he would have tales to regale me with and trinkets - some of them childish, I grant - that never failed to carve places in my heart because it was he who had given them. He delighted in carrying me around and did not mind even when I tagged along when he vanished from the fireside for a late swim. He was fond of swimming. I began to love the activity when he started teaching me, despite Father’s protests that I was too young. 

My brother was a very patient man. I was temperamental as a child. It was quite fortunate that he considered my tantrums endearing. I was unused to such magnanimity. With the tenacity of a limpet, I attached myself to him uncaring of what he thought. 

He was quite the talker, my brother. He could talk to deadwood and make it sigh, I have always believed. His cadence was all wrong for one of the Noldor, as Father noted critically more than once. My brother would trill the deeper syllables and caress the softer ones and enunciate each word as if it were the most melodious sound in the entire world. I listened to him speak and began to learn music unconsciously as the melody of his words washed my awareness into pleasant stupor. 

When I was sent to live with Grandfather, I resented anyone who dared shoot an awed glance at my brother when he took me riding to the marketplace and fell in conversation with someone he knew, leaving me to my own devices for the moment.

“Macalaurë, Káno,” he would remark fondly when I shouted and cried and demanded that he speak to me and to me alone, tugging at his robe all the while.

His robes. My brother was perhaps the only dandy in our family, albeit an unconscious one. Seeing that none of us had been ever concerned in the least about our attire, I had often wondered where he had inherited that trait from. He did not dress in an avant-garde manner. He was usually simply attired in robes that became him well, turning him into a living composition of grace. He did not preen before the mirror, I must hasten to add, but he had always dressed well. Elenwë was the only other person in our family who embraced fine clothing; but seeing that she was a Vanya, I daresay it must have been ingrained in her. In my brother, the taste was inherent. If it had been ingrained, as it was in Elenwë, he would have tried to do something to keep his hair out of the way. 

His hair. The first time I had seen it, it had been dancing with the wind and quite happily resisting his half-hearted efforts to shove it away from his face. It reminded me of myself - disobedience. I have always considered his hair my friend. I loved to twirl the wet crimson locks about my fingers when he was fresh from a bath or a swim. I loved to pat down the unruly coils when he came in after a ride. I simply loved watching it play its mischievous games with the wind even when he was lost to his correspondence or conversation. His fingers would come up impatiently to silently remonstrate with the disobedient locks before retreating. It was as a concerto; the playful mischief of his hair, the inevitable arrival of his fingers and the equally inevitable retreat. 

His fingers. Father once called them skittish spiders. My brother’s fingers could never remain still. They would dance atop tabletops, on the windowframes, through the rich mane of his steeds, on my forearm when he was teaching me to read and write. The nervous staccato was the first fugue I experienced in music. 

When I came to live with Grandfather, my brother was a gangly creature who had not yet come of age, all long limbs and lean torso, quick to smile and quicker to make me smile. In all my life, I do not think that anyone had ever made me smile more. Or weep. But I digress and must return to recounting how the slow tempo built over time. 

 

One of the earliest disagreements Father and I had was about silver. It had been at a time when he was yet striving to help me find a vocation that would suit me; preferably one related to the forge. 

“What is this metal?” he asked, holding up amalgamated lumps of dirty yellow.

“Gold,” I recited by rote. We had been through this many times that day.

“Brilliant!” he said excitedly and I frowned. “Now what is this?”

It was a little container of liquid metal. I scrunched my nose and peered closer.

“Silver,” I said confidently.

“It is quicksilver, not silver,” Father said morosely. “I have told you that many times.”

“It is silver. I know it is silver.” 

“Are you the tutor or am I?” 

“You are my father whom I am trying to please because my brother asked me to,” I said frankly. “And this is silver. His eyes are silver, you see. This metal of yours has the same hue as his eyes.”

I smugly stood and watched while Father’s expressions ran away with him - Naked disbelief, plain despair and finally, exasperated resignation. Need I add that he did not offer to teach me his craft ever again?

 

My brother was secretly flattered, I think, when he heard of this incident from my petulant father. 

“Begone with you!” Father railed. “Take him with you, Maitimo, and see if you can do anything better than beguiling him with your silver eyes.”

So my brother began teaching me to ride, to read and to write. I cared not a whit for all these activities, but since it was him I valiantly did my best. 

“Káno!” He greeted me as usual with a warm smile when he strode into the house hastily in between court affairs. 

“Russandol.” 

I tried the name Nolofinwë had given him. It flowed as a quiet stream over my tongue and I closed my eyes revelling in the lyrical sensation. Warmth crept into my heart, slowly and stealthily, even as his silver eyes turned wide in astonishment.

“It is a childish name,” he remarked. 

“Russandol,” I said again, daring him to forbid me.

“Yes, yes.” He gave in gracefully, as he always did when it came to me. “Stubborn little devil.”

So Russandol he was to me. I quite despised Nolofinwë for sharing the privilege with me. I was possessive, they said. I did not understand the accusation then. My brother was my brother, and he was mine. That was all.

 

When he closed his eyes and hummed along as I idly tuned a harp, I decided that I would learn music, if only to please him. He would stand for hours on end at the door while I played and composed. He would commission fine wood from the eastern forests and implore Father to craft instruments for me. He would ride in exhausted after long weeks of negotiations in Valmar and Alqualondë and ask me if I could play a little something for him before he retired. 

He loved my music and so I loved the same thing. Later on, I would vary my playing to suit his mood; slow falling octaves when he was restless, languorous fugues when he was relaxed and drowsy, stark preludes cresting melancholy when he was removed from the immediate and confined to his thoughts; slowly I could read him in silence without words exchanged and I would let my music soothe him where my words could not. 

 

He was not quick to smile after the parley and his return. The easy, languid tweak of his lips had given away to wistful quirks that were ghastly parodies of the former. But to me they were equivalent to music seeping out of him of its own accord. 

And many years later, one night, as the moon played hide and seek with the clouds, turning my brother’s eyes grey and silver alternately, we rode north, encumbered by two children that I had silently sworn to care for in lieu of the ones lost to the wolves of Doriath. My mind was not on the Silmaril we had lost, or on the woman who had insanely embraced death, or on the fact that we had two charges we could ill afford to take care of. 

My mind was on the exquisite symphony that we had created together, with him underneath me, ululating and undulating as restraint fell away in the course of profound shattering of the final physical barrier between us. I had not known that my name could be a prayer, a chant and a paean all in itself until he proved it that day. Fingers threaded through my hair, came to my high cheekbones, framing my cheek in their delicate grip. Legs twined sinuously about me, coiling and uncoiling as his self-possession fled leaving only music behind. 

So we created music, he and I, unconsciously and blissfully. Breaths in tandem, hearts fluttering mad staccatos, skin taut as the diaphragm of a primeval sheepskin drum, fingers crafting chorales cresting the quiet shores of belonging - we created music as I had never known before. 

Then it was all too much. He was lost to sensation and I was lost to music. We fell and the slow prelude shattered leaving behind sharp chords of panting and gasping, and desperate touches and kisses as we sought to drag each other ashore. Accelerando gave way to andante, and hearts slowly quieted were bound by the symphony. 

 

“What are you thinking of?” he asked me as we made camp.

Silver flashed in awe ever so often in my direction and nervous fingers were trying their utmost to stop bestowing small, unobtrusive touches to my wrists and shoulders. Rubato - his movements were strangely lacking in his usual grace as he awkwardly tried to hide his impromptu smiles cast my way every now and then.

“Of music,” I said frankly.

His eyes narrowed and I was taken aback to see the first flames of possession slivering through their grey before he asked quietly, “Am I to play second string to music now?” 

As the barriers between us had slowly fallen away, shades and hues of his vulnerable heart were unveiling themselves despite his best efforts to hide under his usual veneer of detached affection.

“We created music,” I said then and a quick intake of his breath followed by unbearable silence told me all I had ever yearned to know.

I smiled, and when his lips quirked up in that familiar wistful gesture of percolating melancholy, I felt the inevitable creep of music once again.

It was the opus now - finally, after long fugues and despairing rubatos, and after languorous mixes of andante and accelerando, and after indecisive yearning between allegro and allegretto. 

He closed the distance between us and let himself melt into my embrace. He knew music, and he knew me. So I was not surprised when he spoke a single word then.

“Coda.”

* * *


End file.
